For anyone interested, you can now see the neat little trophies and medals I gave out at the recent COM125 music and blog awards. These were specially designed and shipped all the way from China! See where they came from (really), how I painstakingly handwrote on them, and finally the many happy faces of award winners in class.

As the Spring 2007 semester draws to a close, I threw an MTV-style music and blog awards to highlight the best students in the COM125: Intro to Internet class.

There are two main award categories:
1. The COM125 Idol Contest
2. The Ultimate Blog Awards

For the COM125 Idol Contest, students were ranked by the online community on their singing ability via our own Singshot contest page. There were some strange people from the public who joined in, so I’ve only taken into account our students’ entries. The music categories I came up with include: Best Male Vocal, Best Female Vocal and Best Group Vocal.

For The Ultimate Blog Awards, I took the cumulative score of their weekly blog assignments, and took into account the stuff that were external to the assignment, such as getting linked by popular blogs, getting public comments and amount of personal expression on their blogs. Since I gave out weekly blog awards, it helped in assessing each student’s overall performance.

This week, classes have officially ended. Next week, it’s all about exams. I’ll share more about my teaching experience and whether I’ve decided that Singapore is the place for me in a future blog post. For now, I don’t want to spoil anymore surprises so just watch the show… it’s a good one.

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Comments Off on Video: Grand Finale // The COM125 Music & Blog Awards | General | Permalink Posted by theory

A little last minute, but we’ll be having an exam review & music awards party at LT4.13 this Wed (tomorrow) at 10.30-11.30am. We’ll go through the readings you should focus on on top of the COM125 Study Guide on Wikispaces. Finally, we’ll have a music awards party acknowledging the incredible singers we have in our class. Do come with questions!

This interesting chart was created by my student Cheilla, based on a reading she found relating to our previous week on Online Politics. It highlights why Online Voting is so difficult, compared with traditional eCommerce transactions. I believe that this is a comparison many of us might have made before.

Citing Cheilla: “Many people have wondered why there is no online election available currently. Well, security is absolutely the main reason. It is so vulnerable to make online election since there are plenty talented hackers out there. Meanwhile, e-Commerce, distributing, buying, selling, marketing and servicing of products or services through the Internet (“Electronic Commerce”, 2007), keeps going on. So, I found a discussion on http://www.schneier.com about “Internet Voting vs. Large Value e-Commerce”. People were arguing about the reason why big transaction in the e-Commerce could be protected and online election could not. I came up with this table as the summary of the answers.”

Incidentally, I’ve reopened the COM125 Study Guide (wiki) as part of their final exam preparations. This time I’m giving points for submissions, so the motivation to collaborate on print-worthy notes should be greater. It’s already shaping up pretty well if you’re interested to take a look…